KB / Email / Spam / NEW! Junk Mail Filter
From DreamHost
We've put together a new Junk Mail Filter! Like any other filter, it actively messes with your incoming mail! Don't enable it unless you're sure!
OVERVIEW
Mail comes in and gets scanned by the anti-spam machine. If it's okay, it gets passed on to your normal mail servers and goes in your INBOX. You can see some informational stuff if you look at the full headers of incoming messages.
If, however, a piece of email gets caught by either the Anti-Virus filter or by SpamAssasin, it'll get put in a special database. You can see messages that have been caught by logging into Webmail.
If any Junk Mail has been caught, you'll see a link below your regular folders called "Junk Mail".
Contents |
Advanced Options
You can modify pretty much any setting discussed above by going to the Options->SpamAssasin Options page of Webmail
The top section is for adding people to your White/Black lists.
Below that are preferences for how long to leave messages in the Junk Mail folder, and how often to get reports about what's in your Junk Mail folder.
At the bottom you can set the SpamAssasin scores at which a message should be tagged or quarantined in the Junk Mail folder. The defaults are to never tag the subject line (meaning add **DHSPAM** to the subject of a message), and to Quarantine into Junk Mail at a score of 4 or above.
How To Keep Legit Mail Out of the Junk Mail Folder
The defaults for this beta test are fairly aggressive. Odds are good that some of your legitimate email will get caught by the filter. The best way to deal with this is using a Whitelist. A Whitelist is a list of email addresses you ALWAYS want to get through the filter. There will be links when reading messages for adding the sender to your Whitelist, and when you're viewing messages in the Junk Mail folder.
NOTE (as of July 31, 2007): There is currently an issue (which has been reported to Dreamhost) with Spam Assassin settings and multiple-mailboxes/addresses. If you have created a mailbox and then create other mail addresses which forward to the main mailbox, the Spam Assassin settings *will not propagate* from the main mailbox to the forward-only accounts. If you have Spam Assassin enabled and configured BEFORE you setup your forward-only addresses, then it might work (unconfirmed). The work-around is to login to Squirrel Mail for each address you want to configure.
How to Know If You Have Junk Mail
Besides logging into http://webmail.dreamhost.com/ over and over again, you'll also get an email at or around 4:30PM (Pacific Time) listing any messages you currently have in your Junk Mail folder. By default, the report is only sent on weekdays. You can change this in the Options section of http://webmail.dreamhost.com/!
Extreme settings
If you use webmail on a regular basis, then you can set much lower threshold values. Very low values make a pretty aggressive filter and it is very likely that good mail will be quarantined, but that's intentional.
The trick is to check the quarantine routinely, and the good mails that are falsely caught indicate to you how you should fine-tune your whitelist. Consider whitelisting entire domains like "@dreamhost.com".
You can skip using the "Tag" feature and only use "Quarantine" by setting both to the same value. There's not much point in tagging if you're going to check the quarantine regularly anyway.
The most extreme filter settings are:
- Set How long should mail stay in the quarantine before being automatically removed? to 30 days. This gives you ample time to detect any mails that were falsely caught.
- Set Tag level = -1
- Set Quarantine level = 0
These settings catch as much spam as possible, but will also guarantee catching some of your good mail! That's why your whitelist is important, as well as checking the quarantine list regularly (at least a few times per month).
